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Full catalog/RAP
RAP·dataset

Hourly updated North America weather forecast (NOAA)

NOAA Rapid Refresh (RAP)
atmosphere NOAA NOAA active
In plain English

What it measures. Frequently refreshed short-range weather forecasts covering North America at 13 km resolution, including clouds, precipitation, winds, and temperature.

How it's made. NOAA runs this WRF-based model every hour, pulling in fresh observations including cloud and precipitation data to sharpen near-term forecasts.

How & where you'd use it. Aviation and severe-weather forecasters rely on its hourly updates to stay on top of rapidly changing conditions.

What's measured

aws-pdsagricultureclimatemeteorologicalweather

Coverage & cadence

  • Time span— → ongoing

What you can do with it

  • Map air pollutants — NO₂, aerosols, ozone
  • Track greenhouse gases and Earth's energy budget
  • Feed weather and air-quality analysis
Official description

The Rapid Refresh (RAP) is a NOAA/NCEP operational weather prediction system comprised primarily of a numerical forecast model and analysis/assimilation system to initialize that model. It covers North America and is run with a horizontal resolution of 13 km and 50 vertical layers. The RAP was developed to serve users needing frequently updated short-range weather forecasts, including those in the US aviation community and US severe weather forecasting community. The model is run for every hour of the day; it is integrated to 51 hours for the 03/09/15/21 UTC cycles and to 21 hours for every other cycle. The RAP uses the ARW core of the WRF model and the Gridpoint Statistical Interpolation (GSI) analysis - the analysis is aided with the assimilation of cloud and hydrometeor data to provide more skill in short-range cloud and precipitation forecasts.

Get the data

noaa_access.py
# NOAA Open Data on AWS — public S3, no login
import s3fs

fs = s3fs.S3FileSystem(anon=True)
# find this dataset's bucket in the docs link in the sidebar, then:
# files = fs.ls("noaa-<bucket>/...")
# open NetCDF/GRIB with xarray, COGs with rioxarray
NOAA Open Data is on public AWS S3 — no login at all (anonymous access).